Challenging Ableist Foundations of Modern Medical Practice: The Power of Liturgy

​In the early 20th century, many Christian churches eagerly embraced the American eugenics movement as a way to usher in the Kingdom of God and stay relevant in an increasingly secularized and scientific culture. What many disability advocates recognize as a “eugenic mindset” lingering in modern medical practice remains within Christian churches as well. For this reason, disability advocates have not found natural allies in modern medicine or the Christian Church. A growing number of disability theologians, many of whom work in healthcare, are attempting to correct the situation, however. By working to create hospitable and accessible houses of worship, disability theologians are working to reimagine ways in which Christian practices might empower rather than ostracize persons with disabilities and those who care for them. Such practices, in turn, to reframe the moral worth of persons with disabilities (PWD), the care that is owed to them, and the gifts PWDs bring to communities. This panel will shed light on the ways in which a common Christian liturgical practices and rituals can help congregants, including healthcare providers, understand the dignity and worth of persons with disabilities. By reexamining the ableist paradigms within the foundations of modern medical practices and mainline American churches, panelists will attempt undermine those foundations and renew authentic Christian practices that centralize the universality of human fragility and the need for mutual care and recognition.

The first presenter will explore historical practices of baptism among persons with disabilities, with particular attention to stories of how both historical and contemporary communities of faith have perpetuated an ableist imagination regarding disability and the lives of people with disabilities in the ritual of baptism. The presenter will argue that baptism can enliven an anthropological imagination robustly inclusive of persons with disabilities through its emphasis of profound interdependence and creatureliness as central to human identity. The presenter will offer suggestions as to how this kind of baptismal hermeneutic might inform care practices for health care providers who care for persons with disabilities.

The second presenter will explore the use of healing services in mainline Christian worship. Services for Healing recall practices of the early church wherein church elders anointed the sick and prayed for the forgiveness of sins. Although many contemporary healing services acknowledge the universal need for physical, mental, and spiritual healing amongst God’s people, they often single out persons with disabilities as uniquely in need of healing and wholeness. Far too often, the underlying message of such services is that disability is equivalent to suffering and iniquity. By coupling healing services with the common call to confession, however, there is an opportunity to universalize human fragility and reveal how disability is exacerbated or constructed through social structures. Services of Healing thus have the potential to model practices of justice and inclusion for PWD that can be carried over into health care practices.​ The third presenter will examine common ableist assumptions in Christian conversation about mental illness and its treatment. There is deep synergy between cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which focuses on right thinking and right action as a remedy for unwanted emotion, and modern American Christian responses to mental illness, which often draw on and reflect cognitive behavioral principles. CBT, as practical theologian Don Browning has observed, can even be understood as a quasi-religious system that reflects deeply entrenched Christian (and especially Reformed protestant) commitments to the primacy of word and doctrine in Christian discipleship. But, by promoting control of unwanted emotion and behavior through language and belief, Christian cognitive-behavioral approaches (including ostensibly anti-psychological movements like “biblical counseling”) perpetuate the cognitive-linguistic ableism that already permeates American protestant Christianity, and provide theological sanction for stigma against people with mental health conditions that do not respond to these techniques. The presenter will argue that Christian responses to mental illness must reject this cognitive ableism and must develop more textured pastoral approaches that place word and belief in the context of table, body, presence, and song.